Ouya Ships 1,200 Developer Consoles, Offers Sneak Peek at Console UI

We’ve been following the Ouya open source gaming console ever since it raised an astonishing amount of money in a very short amount of time. The latest development is that Ouya has 1,200 developer consoles on pallets ready to ship as promised, which is a good sign for the future viability of the ambitious project. Ouya says that the consoles will be on devs’ doorsteps within days.

The contents of the package include a welcome letter, a pair of D-pad controllers, the console itself, HDMI and micro-USB cables, and a power adapter. (Batteries are included.) The D-pads and console are both transparent to show devs the guts inside; the final product will look different.

The console now includes a micro-USB port and a fan to aid cooling, and as promised, users can open the thing up and hack away. Developers will also get a taste of what the UI will eventually look like, and they can get cracking on developing games for the new device with the free ODK.

Ouya UI mockup

There’s a lot of excitement mixed with a dose of skepticism surrounding Ouya, but seeing the hardware actually leave the shipping dock is a great sign. The project has a long way to go, of course; even assuming devs don’t find too many bugs to deal with, mass-producing the devices will be another major challenge, and there needs to be a healthy game ecosystem for anyone other than interested hobbyists to plunk down $99 for their own unit.